Limits and Challenges to Moscow’s Military Airpower Ambitions
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By Roger McDermott
January 31, 2019
In recent years, Moscow has placed growing emphasis on procuring modern and advanced platforms to increase the combat capability of its Air Force, subsumed within the Aerospace Forces (Vozdushno Kosmicheskikh Sil—VKS). Many of these new aerial platforms have also been tried and tested in military operations in Syria, where the VKS played the leading role in Moscow’s efforts to prop up the Bashar al-Assad regime. In addition to gaining invaluable combat experience for pilots and being able to experiment with the use of airpower, the VKS seeks to capitalize on this to receive additional advanced assets, ranging from fifth-generation fighters to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Earlier in January, this was illustrated by a media frenzy surrounding the sighting of an experimental heavy UAV, Okhotnik (Hunter), hailed by its designers as the “future of aviation†(Voyennoye Obozreniye, January 24, 2019). Despite these breakthroughs, there are critical limits and challenges likely to check Moscow’s longer-term airpower ambitions.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2019/01/31/limits_and_challenges_to_moscows_military_airpower_ambitions_114150.html
